A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water

Olthuis has spent more than two decades seeking ways to coexist with the wolf. His architectural firm, Waterstudio, specializes in homes that float, but its constructions have little in common with the wooden houseboats that have long lined Dutch canals. Traditional houseboats were often converted freight ships; narrow, low-slung, and lacking proper plumbing, they earned a reputation in the postwar period as bohemian, sometimes seedy dwellings. (Utrecht’s onetime red-light district was a row of forty-three houseboat brothels.) Waterstudio’s signature projects, which Olthuis prefers to call “water houses,” look more like modern condominiums, with glassy façades, full-height ceilings, and multiple stories. In the past decade, as severe weather brought on by climate change has caused catastrophic flooding everywhere from Tamil Nadu to New England, demand for Waterstudio’s architecture has grown. The firm is currently working on floating pod hotels in Panama and Thailand; six-story floating apartment buildings in Scandinavia; a floating forest in the Persian Gulf, as part of a strategy to combat heat and humidity; and, in its most ambitious undertaking to date, a floating “city” in the Maldives.